I believe Evernote is an effective tool to “collect” websites as I find them online. I see the merits of this program and the application for an Education student and eventually as a teacher. As we do use such a high number of resources, I think it is an effective tool for the purpose of collecting websites. I do like that I can sign into Evernote on any device or computer and my files are there. I do not, however, like the Evernote web clipping tool for the Mozilla Firefox internet browser. I know in the Google Chrome Browser you can clip YouTube videos, so I wish the Evernote team had made this possible in the Mozilla Firefox browser as well. I think Evernote is an effective application for school and teaching related resources, but I think for personal resources I would just use the Bookmarks tool in my browser. I kept all of my web clippings to school related resources and plan to continue to use it to organize my teaching materials in the future.
I find some parts of Evernote clunky. I dislike the way that you have to make Table of Contents to organize notes in a certain section. After you make a Table of Contents, the order of the notes cannot be changed and nothing else can be added to it. I also dislike how file uploads go. If there was a way to upload a file without putting it into a note, I think the Evernote application would be easier to use. I also think the Evernote application would benefit from allowing users to have subfolders, because that would help to organize my notes. Currently, the only way to find notes is by searching specific tags. I would like a little bit more control over the organization of my notes.
Over the semester I accumulated 92 new teaching notes in my EDC 430 notebook. Tags I used to organize my notes include Student Engagement, Student Motivation, Lesson Plan, Science, ESL strategies, and NGSS. As the semester progressed, I found I had enough web pages clipped about different strategies for engagement and involving ESL students, etc. that I turned my attention toward lesson plan ideas. I specifically started looking up NGSS lesson planning ideas, as these will be the most helpful to me as we transition toward NGSS. I believe my Personal Knowledge Base is important to my professional learning. If we were not asked to download and use the Evernote application over multiple semesters, I would not have a single easy to access place to find all of my teaching resources.
I find some parts of Evernote clunky. I dislike the way that you have to make Table of Contents to organize notes in a certain section. After you make a Table of Contents, the order of the notes cannot be changed and nothing else can be added to it. I also dislike how file uploads go. If there was a way to upload a file without putting it into a note, I think the Evernote application would be easier to use. I also think the Evernote application would benefit from allowing users to have subfolders, because that would help to organize my notes. Currently, the only way to find notes is by searching specific tags. I would like a little bit more control over the organization of my notes.
Over the semester I accumulated 92 new teaching notes in my EDC 430 notebook. Tags I used to organize my notes include Student Engagement, Student Motivation, Lesson Plan, Science, ESL strategies, and NGSS. As the semester progressed, I found I had enough web pages clipped about different strategies for engagement and involving ESL students, etc. that I turned my attention toward lesson plan ideas. I specifically started looking up NGSS lesson planning ideas, as these will be the most helpful to me as we transition toward NGSS. I believe my Personal Knowledge Base is important to my professional learning. If we were not asked to download and use the Evernote application over multiple semesters, I would not have a single easy to access place to find all of my teaching resources.